Internet wizard dead at 26

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment. He was 26.

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that a friend of Swartz's had discovered the body.

At 14, Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public.

But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

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Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Swartz's death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

"Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world," said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Swartz "a complicated prodigy" and said "greybeards approached him with awe."

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Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who "looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn't necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult."

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Swartz's death early Saturday.

Itinerant life

Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Centre for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense.

Joining Malamud's efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

The government abruptly shut down the free library program, and Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account of the events, "I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts." He recalled telling Swartz: "You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer."

'Crashing down the door'

Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, "I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away." He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother. The federal government investigated but decided not to prosecute.

In 2011, however, Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at MIT by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.

Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a U.S. attorney, pressed on, saying that "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

Malamud said that while he did not approve of Swartz's actions at MIT, "access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity."

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an email, he called Swartz "uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant."

"The world was a better place with him in it," he said.

Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him, saying that "Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself." He added, however, "It's a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself)."

Struggle

In 2007, Swartz wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness. "Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don't feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness."

Lawrence Lessig, the head of the Safra Centre at Harvard, who worked for a time on behalf of Swartz's legal defense, noted in an interview that the police in Cambridge, Mass., had arrested Swartz almost two years to the day before his suicide.

That arrest led to the eventual federal indictment and financial ruin for Swartz, who had made money on the sale of Reddit to Conde Nast but had never tried to turn his intellect to making money.

"I can just imagine him thinking it was going to be a million-dollar defense," Lessig said. "He didn't have a million dollars."

(* For help or information call Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251 or Lifeline on 131 114, or visit beyondblue.org.au)